Vanessa Chan, vice dean of Penn Engineering, believes that proper and well-developed sales skills are essential in ensuring an innovation can be launched effectively, writes Sarah Huffman for Technical.ly.
Chan noted that, despite popular belief, Thomas Edison did not invent the lightbulb, but he is remembered for it because he figured out how to bring it to the mass market. She uses this example to effectively teach young engineers and inventors the importance of knowing how to communicate their product’s potential impact on the world.
“If you want to have an impact on the world, you have to understand how the world works,” she said.
Chan is the first vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at Penn Engineering, where she guides students in transforming ideas into products. Her goal is to make Penn Engineering a place that develops practical engineers, since no other school currently provides this type of commercialization focus.
“Professors need to understand how we think about commercialization,” she said. “It’s research, development, demonstration, deployment; it’s all four stages. In academia, we focus on research, maybe a little bit of development, but we can’t just be focused on hard technology and science.”
Read more about Vanessa Chan and her vision as Penn Engineering’s first vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship in Technical.ly.
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